Carol Bartosz

Carol Bartosz has been working in financial services and consulting for 28 years. She has a background in animal science. Bartosz has been a SAS ambassador since she first used SAS® software in 1979.

How long have you been using SAS®?

34 years.

What SAS products have you used in the past? What products and solutions are you currently using?

Back in 1979, there were just DATA steps and PROC steps and that is what we used. I remember when PROC Harvey was in existence, primarily because I studied under Dr. Harvey. When SAS began to segment its product offerings, my primary usage became Base SAS and SAS/STAT®. Today, we still mainly focus on those two.

But the biggest addition to the toolset we currently use is SAS® Enterprise Miner™. I was first introduced to SAS Enterprise Miner more than a decade ago and have been a customer at three different employers. We have also recently purchased SAS Model Manager.

What is a problem you have solved using SAS?

I think this question should be, what problems do you solve without using SAS! Our most important questions and challenges, as well as our everyday production work, all involve the use of SAS.

What is the most innovative way you have used SAS?

At one point in my career, I used SAS to build some parameter selection input screens so that we could have the ultimate flexibility in crafting reports. Since this was back in 1990, and the primary way to capture user input was with mainframe CICS, we all thought it was pretty cool.

How has SAS changed in the time you have been using it?

The product offerings have become much more diverse. The company has tried to craft offerings that enable users to meet the demands of a changing environment. However, they allow for flexibility and user domain knowledge input while harnessing the power of SAS.

Has your work with SAS been influenced by any other members of the SAS community?

Not recently.

If you could point a new SAS user to one resource, what would it be?

I'm probably a dinosaur, but in my department, we train new SAS users all the time. And our standard is to start with Base SAS. We do use SAS® Enterprise Guide®, but we try to encourage Base SAS first and SAS Enterprise Guide later. We do like the palette that enables traceability of our steps that comes with SAS Enterprise Guide and SAS Enterprise Miner. Documentation is getting so much scrutiny these days that any help we can get in generating it is much appreciated.